The naming game is a formal mechanism that describes the development of a lexicon in a society of culturally interacting agents. We will here use a cellular automaton version of this game to study the innuence of an extra-linguistic structure over the evolution of the lexicon, but also the innuence of language over this a priori structure. This extra-linguistic structure will be coded by rst gi...

This paper discusses a new approach to controlling for the environment when estimating efficiency. In response to the literature on the international comparison of bank efficiency, we draw the attention to a local dimension of comparison. By introducing geographical weights and estimating local frontiers for each US savings bank for the 2001-09 period, we find that the bank technical performanc...

Many documents that can be found in the World Wide Web include some kind of geographical information, often in an implicit way. The use of resources like gazetteers and geographical ontologies can improve the results in Geographical Information Retrieval. Unfortunately, the construction of such ontologies is a long and laborious process; therefore, building an ontology in a semi-automatical way...

 This paper discusses traditional development models of GIS and proposes another model, geographical information system shell(GISS). Following the thought of GISS, a geographic information query tool(GIQT) is developed. GIQT's main purpose and menu structure are introduced, as well as the classification and encoding. This paper especially describes the implementation of "two-direction multi-fu...